Drawing on fieldwork conducted with the designers of and participants in a new fellowship program to connect globally distributed grassroots leaders, this article defines a core set of communication-design practices that support emerging collectives and projects. The three practices detailed – creating a script, building a platform, and inventing protocols to document activity – can be understood as part of an “art of assembly” that is yet to be fully and systematically articulated.

Prior researchers have identified charter documents as texts that serve an outsize role in stabilizing social reality and mediating work, writing, and network building. While charter documents are typically authoritative and text-only tomes, this article expands the category to include charter graphics, visual texts that serve similarly important genre and network functions. Through retrospective analysis of one charter graphic and its role in a decade-long project by a nonprofit organization, this article demonstrates the potential rhetorical, social, and network functions of charter graphics; distinguishes them from charter documents; and offers suggestions for both practitioners and researchers.

Nonprofit organizations have long used the personal experience narratives of clients, staff, and stakeholders in their communications. This study explores digital-age practices with this text form, analyzing 82 collections of digital personal experience narratives (DPENs) housed at or linked to Web sites of nonprofit organizations. Results are reported on the variety and frequency of the modes, featured constituencies, narrative perspectives, and digital interface features in the sample. Overall, the nonprofit DPEN collections sampled showed limited use of new digital production and distribution possibilities. Practice, however, differed notably between two segments of nonprofits: networks and service organizations. To explore these results, the article discusses key examples of DPEN collections from each segment.

This essay explores content, a word and concept now often associated with writing in fields including marketing, journalism, publishing, and technical communication. Ipresent a definition of content appropriate to writing studies and explore a range of issues and practices that the content metaphor can bring to our professional, scholarly, and pedagogical attention.